'The go-to firm' working with 'red-state legislatures to devise extremist policies': report

26 May 2024

Republican officials are seeking help from a 31-year old Christian group to help drive and defend anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws, according to a Saturday, May 25 Rolling Stone report.

With the mission "to change the law and culture of the nation," the publication reports, "by helping do away with the separation of church and state," the far-right group has become "the go-to firm" for GOP officials.

Rollin Stone reports:

According to public records produced at Rolling Stone’s request, Idaho has partnered with ADF on at least four separate lawsuits recently: U.S. v. State of Idaho (concerning whether the state’s abortion ban violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act), Poe v. Labrador (the gender-affirming care case), State of Washington et al. v. United States Food & Drug Administration et al. (concerning the FDA approval of mifepristone) and Roe v. Critchfield (over a ban on trans students using the bathroom that matches their gender identity).

It’s not just Idaho — an alarming number of Republican officials are outsourcing their most controversial lawsuits to the legal advocacy group. Rolling Stoneobtained contracts that ADF entered into with Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach to help him defend a law that forces abortion providers to give inaccurate information to their patients, and Yavapai County Attorney Dennis McGrane as he sought to intervene in a case challenging Arizona’s pre-Civil War abortion ban. Records show Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds previously recruited ADF to represent the State of Iowa and the Iowa Board of Medicine as they defended a 24-hour waiting period for in-state abortions passed in 2020, and a 2018 ban on abortions after cardiac activity. (Both lawsuits were brought against the state by Planned Parenthood.)

"What you’re seeing is the wholesale outsourcing of the entire legislative, litigation, and lawmaking process to billionaire-funded, theocratic extremists, who are driving an agenda through a coordinated strategy through various levers of government power,” Court Accountability's Alex Aronson told Rolling Stone.

"The same billionaires that captured the Supreme Court are working behind the scenes with these red-state legislatures to devise extremist policies that will survive judicial review, because they know that the judges that they themselves have put on the bench are amenable to these results. It’s a terrifying outcome for democracy and law."

While "It’s not unusual for attorneys general to bring on outside counsel when they’re going to the Supreme Court. Historically, however, experts say, it has not been common for attorneys general to outsource their litigation efforts to private, agenda-driven interest groups," the publication notes.

"It’s no great shock that attorneys general, over the last decade, have increasingly become frontline soldiers in our legal cultural wars," University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck told Rolling Stone. "But part of why that’s been possible is because of the special abilities, and the special privileges that states and other government actors have as litigants."

He added, "These attorneys general were elected to represent the people of their state, not the Alliance Defending Freedom. There’s the political problem, which is: 'Who’s working for whom?' which in turn raises a serious accountability problem — 'Who’s calling the shots?"

Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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